Although he presumably can still laugh at a Woody Woodpecker cartoon just as easily as the rest of us Joe Shmoes, Baltimore-based maximalist chamber-pop artiste Dan Deacon has been ascending to ever more dizzying heights of compositional rigor and grandeur in recent years. (Okay, yeah, he still lets his hair down once in a while…)
Case in point: he’s just announced that some re-purposed music from his ambitious (read: “Steve Reich-ish”) 2012 album America will accompany the taut and ripping glutes, calfs, and hamstrings of none other than THE New York City Ballet at the end of January.
Titled The Times Are Racing, the ballet (choreographed by dancer/choreographer Justin Peck and with lighting design by Brandon Stirling Baker and the costumes by Humberto Leon) will have its world premiere as part of the Company’s annual “New Combinations Evening” on January 26 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center in NYC, with subsequent performances on January 28, February 1, February 2, and February 4 — as well as a few more later in the spring on May 5 and May 9.
Tickets for this spectacular collision of high and low art are available from the New York City Ballet’s website. And just in case you need a refresher, you can watch the (cough) Adult Swim-directed video for Deacon’s 22-minute, four-part USA suite down below, as well as his new track “Open Toad Segment,” which was released earlier this year. Boom. Consider yourself culturally enriched (wasn’t even as hard as you thought, now was it?).